Call for applications for the 6th annual Baltic Sea Region History Conference until March 31, 2020
Baltic Sea Region Film History Conference is an annual international event; it aims to bring together film scholars and researchers, who analyse the film history of the Baltic Sea Region. The conference seeks to share the insights of the latest findings and to promote film cultures of this yet often unacknowledged region. One of the aims of the conference is to encourage scholars to develop international cooperation in historical and theoretical research of Baltic cinemas. The first conference was held in 2014 in Tallinn (Estonia). From 2019, the conference became mobile, and Riga (Latvia) is the host of the conference in 2020. The main organisers of the VI Conference is the Latvian Academy of Culture, in partnership with Lithuanian Theatre and Music Academy, and Film Archive of the National Archives of Estonia.
Genre is frequently used term in the theoretical analysis of film, and a label for promoting films to audiences. Study of genres has a long-standing tradition internationally, but radical changes in the film production technologies and viewing practices, as well as current global and social processes puts forward new challenges for genre theories, urging reconsider previously stable genre models and schemes and analyse them as dynamic phenomenon.
Organisers of the VI Baltic Sea Region Film History Conference Genres and their Transformations: The Global and Local Contexts invite scholars and researchers to offer wide spectrum and methodologically varied papers: to analyse history of genre and contemporary trends in the region in global and local contexts; discuss theoretical challenges for researching genres; examine certain filmmakers, and other topics.
The conference will be held at the National Film School of the Latvian Academy of Culture (Elijas iela 17, Riga) on 14 – 15 October 2020. Participation at the conference is free of charge. The language of the conference is English. The paper presentation – 20 minutes.
Keynote speakers:Ewa Mazierska, Professor for Contemporary Cinema at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Central Lancashire; Jörg Schweinitz, Professor of Film Theory and Film History in the Department of Cinema Studies at the University of Zurich, Switzerland; Linda Williams, Professor in Film & Media and Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley; Yuri Tsivian, William Colvin Emeritus Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.
We invite presenters to submit papers on topics that could include but are not limited to:
- History of film genres in the Baltic sea countries: genres, films, filmmakers, political and social contexts
- Reception of genre films: history and current situation, global trends and local specificity
- Models of genre films: poetics and paradigms
- Hybridization of film genres and bricolage
- The turn of genric 're-': recontextualization, reconstruction and remediation
- Film genre as grammar of ideology: syntactic, pragmatic and semantic elements
- Transmediality and the fusion of genre codes
The submissions should be sent to e-mail address zpc@lka.edu.lv until 31 March 2020, stating in the subject “Baltic Sea Region Film History Conference”. The proposal has to include:
- The title and a short abstract of the proposed presentation up to 600 characters (with spaces);
- Name, surname, institutional affiliation, academic degree, and a short biography of the presenter (or presenters) up to 300 characters (with spaces).
The international organising committee will consider the submitted abstracts based on their scholarly merit and thematic relevance for the conference. Notification of successful abstracts and the inclusion of the paper into the conference programme will be sent by e-mail by 30 April 2020.
We offer a possibility to publish the papers in the conference special edition of the scientifically reviewed scholarly journal in English “Culture Crossroads” http://www.culturecrossroads.lv/ published by the Latvian Academy of Culture. The journal is indexed in the databases EBSCO (Humanities Source Ultimate), ULRICH'S, Central and Eastern European Online Library (CEEOL). Deadline for submitting papers will be 30 January 2021. The planned issue “Genre in the Baltic cinema in the 21st century” is scheduled for release by September 2021.